The Ted Hughes Society Podcast

About The Ted Hughes Society Podcast

This podcast is dedicated to the life and work of Ted Hughes. Its aims are to promote the understanding and appreciation of his writing, especially in schools and universities; to support research and scholarship into his life and work; and to continue to support some of the poublic causes to which he was devoted, especially the preservation and conversation of rivers and the countryside and the encouragement of creative writing for writers of all ages and levels of attainment. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy (https://acast.com/privacy) for more information.

Publisher

Mick Gowar

Category

arts · education · society & culture

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

11 Jul 2022

Latest episode

11 Sept 2026

Latest episodes

29 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   11 Sept 2026

   Meet Our Folks 4: Mike Sweeting

   Welcome to the latest Ted Hughes Society podcast. This episode is released just before the Society’s Conference, entitled The Legacy of Ted Hughes, to be held at Hughes’s former college, Pembroke College, Cambridge, and our guest, for this most recent episode in our short season of talks by prominent members of the society, is Dr. Mike Sweeting. Mike is a member of the society’s council, with a particular responsibility for constitutional matters. Like many prominent members of the society, Mike has undertaken post-graduate study on the work of Ted Hughes, in Mike’s case, focusing on Hughes’s deep interest in and knowledge of anthropology. Ted Hughes went up to Cambridge to study English Literature, but in his final year changed to Archaeology and Anthropology - reportedly, following a visionary dream of burnt fox, which he claimed warned him that his continued formal study of English Literature was destroying the poems that were existing in some potential form in either his subconscious or some otherworld. Like Hughes, Mike was born and raised in the rural North of England, where Mike’s father was a farmer. However, Mike decided against the farming life, entering Durham University where he progressed from his first degree to eventual doctoral studies. Since completing his PhD Mike has been involved in three areas of work, often simultaneously. He has been a scholar of the poetry of both Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, but also a church leader and Christian Pastor, and a businessman and business consultant. He has advised owners of businesses on Mergers & Acquisitions and has also established corporate finance firms in 15 countries and has been chairman of a charity working in India, the USA, Canada, Romania and Argentina. Mike has been a keen rock climber and target shooter since the age of 15. if you have any comments about the podcast, any suggestions for furture episodes, or would like any information on the Ted Hughes Society, please contact me by email at membership@thetedhughesssociety. I look forward to hearing from you, and please do subscribe, rate and review this podcast; it does help others who might be interested in poetry, or the work of Ted Hughes, to find the podcast. The opening and closing music is from Beethoven's String Quartet No 14, opus 131, performed by the Orion String Quartet. (The extract is reproduced under Creative Commons licence IMSLP: Creative Commons Atribution Non-commercial No Derivative 3.0.) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy (https://acast.com/privacy) for more information.

2. 

   24 Jul 2026

   Meet our Folks 3: Terry Gifford

   Welcome to the Ted Hughes Society podcast, and the latest in our series Meet Our Folks, in which prominent society members talk about themselves and their particular interest in the life and work of Ted Hughes. Our guest for this episode,Terry Gifford, is a poet, climber, former chair of the Ted Hughes Society. Terry is undoubtedly one of the foremost Ted Hughes scholars, a leading critic of the work of D.H.Lawrence and a pioneer in the field of eco-criticism. His many publications include Ted Hughes, a critical study co-authored with Neil Roberts and published by Faber & Faber in 1981; Teaching Advanced Level English Literature: a student-centred approach (with John Brown, Routledge 1989); Reconnecting with John Muir (University of Georgia Press, 2006); Ted Hughes in the Routledge Guides to Literature series (2009); The Cambridge Companion to Ted Hughes (2011); Ted Hughes in Context, published by Cambridge University Press in 2018; Pastoral in the Routledge New Critical Idiom series (2019); and Reading and D.H.Lawrence in the Anthropocene (Edinburgh University Press 2025). A selection of Terry’s varied, skilful and engaging poetry A Feast of Fools, was published by Cinnamon Press in 2018. Until his retirement in 2004, Terry was Reader in Literature and Environment at the University of Leeds. He was the Director of Research in the School of Performance and Cultural Industries and introduced practice-based Ph.D. programmes at Leeds in theatre, dance and creative writing. And for 21 years, until 2008, he was the founding director of the annual International Festival of Mountaineering Literature. Terry is at present a visiting scholar at the Research Centre for Environmental Humanities at Bath Spa University, and is currently Profesor Honorifico at the Universidad de Alicante, Spain, where he co-supervises Ph.D. students in ecocriticism. In this episode, Terry reflects on his working life in education - starting as a school teacher and then acquiring the knowledge, qualification and experience to teach in universities; as a scholar, particularly of Ted Hughes and D.H. Lawrence; but running through Terry’s talk, like a strong thread linking his various projects and interests is collaboration and partnership. if you have any comments about the podcast, any suggestions for furture episodes, or would like any information on the Ted Hughes Society, please contact me by email at membership@thetedhughesssociety. I look forward to hearing from you, and please do subscribe, rate and review this podcast; it does help others who might be interested in poetry, or the work of Ted Hughes, to find the podcast. The opening and closing music is from Beethoven's String Quartet No 14, opus 131, performed by the Orion String Quartet. (The extract is reproduced under Creative Commons licence IMSLP: Creative Commons Atribution Non-commercial No Derivative 3.0.) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy (https://acast.com/privacy) for more information.

3. 

   27 May 2026

   Meet our Folks 2: Mark Wormald

   Our guest for this episode is Mark Wormald, current chair of the Ted Hughes Society, and a leading scholar, editor and irrepressible enthusiast for the work of Ted Hughes. In this latest podcast in the short series ‘Meet Our Folks’, Mark traces his growing scholarly and personal interest in Ted Hughes’s poetry and life and Hughes passionate concern for the preservation and cleanliness of Britain’s rivers - a concern they both have in common. Mark hosted the conference Ted Hughes: From Cambridge to Collected, which was held at Pembroke college where Hughes had been an undergraduate and Mark was then Senior Tutor and Director of Studies for part 2 English. The conference led to a critical essay collection with the same title, edited by Mark and Neil Roberts and published in 2013, and also Mark’s election as Chair of the Ted Hughes Society and to his widely read and much praised book, The Catch: in search of Ted Hughes published in 2022. Hughes studied English Literature and then Archaeology and Anthropology at Pembroke College from 1951 to 1954, and as we’ll hear, thanks to Mark’s astute curation and tenacious fund-raising, Pembroke College now holds an extensive and growing archive of Hughes's original manuscripts, printed books, letters, and artwork for Hughes’s books. As Mark relates, the college has also acquired Hughes’s writing desk and chair, as well as a correspondence and previously unseen work shared with close friends like Seamus Heaney and the artist Barrie Cooke whose work and close friendships with not only Hughes but also Seamus Heaney, John Montague and Hughes’s son Nicholas, is the focal point of the exhibition Living Water: Poetry, Art and the Fight for Clean Rivers is presently on two sites: Pembroke College and the University Library of the University of Cambridge (https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1KeJHtJDUa/ (https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1KeJHtJDUa/)). Also, due to Mark’s remarkable detective skills, the mystery of where in Pembroke College Ted Hughes claimed to have his dream of The Scorched Fox, and also where he barbecued steaks over a gas fire and painted pictures of leopards on the ceiling, may at last have been solved! The opening and closing music is from Beethoven's String Quartet No 14, opus 131, performed by the Orion String Quartet. (The extract is reproduced under Creative Commons licence IMSLP: Creative Commons Atribution Non-commercial No Derivative 3.0.) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy (https://acast.com/privacy) for more information.

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

Spotify

4.8 / 5

4 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 39 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

51

Social presence

0

YouTube

0

Engagement

68

Contact The Ted Hughes Society Podcast

Guest appearances

Books guests

Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.